Whamit!

We have some summer news to share with you:

• The CreteLing Summer School took place in July at the University of Crete in Rethymnon. There were courses and seminars in a variety of linguistic subfields. Several MIT faculty (and alumni) taught courses:
  • Adam Albright – Learning Grammars
  • Kai von Fintel – The Only Class: Exclusives, Exceptives, Minimizers
  • Sabine Iatridou – Intermediate Syntax

There were also many MIT Linguistics graduate students who TAed for CreteLing Summer School including Neil Banerjee, Cora Lesure, Mitya Privoznov, Vincent Rouillard, Frank Staniszewski, Dóra Takács, Chris Yang, and Stan Zompì. MIT Linguistics & Philosophy alumni who taught include William Snyder, Doug Pulleyblank, Pritty Patel-Grosz, Patrick Grosz, Zoltan Szabo, Philippe Schlenker, Heidi Harley, and Paul Kiparsky.

• Faculty Norvin Richards spent May 24-26 at AFLA 26, at the University of Western Ontario, where he gave a talk on “Association with lang ‘only’ in Tagalog”.  Other speakers included TC Chen ‘18, Mitcho Erlewine ‘14, and Lisa Travis ‘84. https://www.uwo.ca/linguistics/afla26/program.html
• David Pesetsky taught at three summer schools, on case theory and clause type. He taught a month-long class at the beginning of the summer at the 2019 Summer Linguistics Institute of the Linguistic Society of America, hosted by UC Davis. In August, he taught a week-long class at the University of Brasília, which hosted the II Escola de Inverno de Linguística Formal — technically a winter school, of course! And this week he will teach at the Fall School (sic!) for Formal Syntax and Formal Semantics at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

• Tanya Bondarenko (3rd year), Colin Davis (5th year), and Mitya Privoznov (5th year) participated in the fieldtrip to the village Verkhnyaya Balkaria (Kabardino-Balkar Republic, Russia) organized by Lomonosov Moscow State University, where they worked on the Karachay-Balkar language. Tanya has submitted some pictures from their fieldtrip that you can view below!

• Just out from MIT Press, a brand-new textbook about semantics, by Daniel Altshuler, Terence Parsons and our very own Roger Schwarzschild! Congratulations to Roger and his co-authors! https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/course-semantics.

•  Stanislao Zompì paper published in Glossa!

Congratulations to Stan Zompì whose paper “Ergative is not inherent: Evidence from *ABA in suppletion and syncretism” was published in July. http://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.816

• Sulemana article published in Glossa!

Congratulations to Abdul-Razak Sulemana whose paper “Q-particles and the nature of covert movement: Evidence from Bùlì” was just published! Abdul-Razak is a final-year graduate student in our program, and taught at the African Linguistics School this summer.

• Conference presentations:
  • At the end of May, Elise Newman, (4th year) attended ACAL 50 at UBC in Vancouver, where she presented a talk titled “vP infinitives in Wolof: on A-bar movement to Spec vP”.
  • In June, Maša Močnik ( 5th year), gave a talk Higher-Order Confidence with Epistemic Modals here: http://semantics.uni-konstanz.de/workshops/evidence-2019/program
  • Sherry Chen (3rd year) “I spent my summer in Berlin doing various things: 1. This summer, I’ve been funded by the XPrag.de Research Internship to work at ZAS Berlin, on the MUQTASP project “Modelling the Use of Quantifiers in Typical and Atypical Speakers Probabilistically”. I worked primarily under the supervision of Dr Bob van Tiel and Dr Uli Sauerland. I was very happy to have this opportunity to work with the researchers here in Berlin.2. In July, I gave two invited talks here:Memory Retrieval in the Processing of Anaphoric Presupposition Dependencies. Talk given at the Psycholinguistics Colloquium, Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. Processing Lifetime Effects in Tensed and Tenseless Languages. Talk given at the Psycholinguistics Colloquim, Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. 3. In August, I attended the DGfS summer school organized by theXPrag.de Priority Program. I studied presupposition, sentence processing at the syntax-discourse interface, and probabilistic pragmatics. This summer school offers a wide range of courses, taught by leading researchers in the field. It was a wonderful program that I thoroughly enjoyed and would enthusiastically recommend!” 

• Education:
  • Tracy Kelley (2nd year) taught language classes for Wampanoag tribal elders throughout the summer as part of the tribe’s “Lunch & Learn” program. She mainly instructed through immersion using total physical response (TPR) and a variety of interactive games. She also continued to develop curriculum for a new high school language course that is being offered by the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project at Mashpee Middle High School.